Elections On The Plane

This was inspired by and is at this point largely just a recreation of election simulation graphs by Ka-Ping Ye. This is at least the good science step of independent verification of results, and I hope to add my own twists. So far I've added my pet method "IRNR" to the mix and done several other configurations of visualization.

The "political spectrum" is often expanded from a one dimensional scale from left to right to a two dimensional system on axes such as social policy or fiscal policy.
Whatever the axes it is a useful metaphore.

Below are simulations of elections based on putting voters and candidates in a two dimensional space of political thinking.
Candidates take various positions (indicated by diamonds) and voters tend to vote for the closest candidates.
The graphs are made by simulating a voting populace centered at each point in the image.
Diversity in the voters is over a gaussian distribution around that center.
This randomness causes some fuzz in the graphs in regions where an election method is sensitive enough to that noise to occasionaly flip the result.